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People who attempted suicide as youths trace their recovery

Three people who attempted suicide as youths tell their stories of emerging from the abyss and learning to embrace life.

Kristen Bellows of Toronto attempted suicide six years ago. Today she is a university graduate and living with her partner of three years. Photo taken on Nov. 17, 2011. (Ian Willms for the Toronto Star)

Darren Savage came close to a suicide attempt 18 months ago. Since then his life has improved dramatically through school, reading and writing. Here, Savage is at the Hazel McCallion Learning Centre, in Mississauga, November 18th, 2011. (Ian Willms / for the Toronto Star)

After attempting suicide in her teens, Kate Wren is now a case worker for the Canadian Mental Health Association. (Ian Willms / for the Toronto Star)

By Leslie ScrivenerFeature Writer

Sat., Dec. 3, 2011

Sometimes, amid the fullness of youth, teenagers can see only darkness in themselves and the future. Some try to die by suicide. Many think about it. They can’t imagine life will get any better.

But it can. Kristen Bellows is still in awe of her happiness and success, years after attempting suicide as a 16-year old. She found contentment doesn’t just come to her; she has to work at it. The first step was thinking of one good thing about herself. Just one.

Teens don’t realize, as Oakville university student Darren Savage says, that anger, despair or loneliness are temporary. They do pass.

Savage came close to suicide. It scared him.

Kate Wren got in the habit of trying to kill herself. Some reports say that among young people there are some 200 attempts for every suicide death. Wren now makes jewellery with life-affirming messages and has a job helping people regain mental health.

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Ian Manion, a clinical psychologist and leading researcher on youth suicide, says a suicide attempt does not mean a young life is ruined forever.

He cites a French study published in 2009 that found 10 years after a suicide attempt, 70 per cent of teens in the study were happy, and nearly three-quarters were in good health.

Their lives aren’t perfect; they still have problems, but they gained perspective and learned how to cope.

Teens who attempt suicide do not always want to die. “They want to feel different . . . they don’t see an end,” says Manion, executive director of the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health, in Ottawa. “Someone who hasn’t experienced it can’t understand how difficult it would be.”

Kids who repeatedly try to kill themselves don’t see the act as repeated. “It’s that moment in time. There’s no sense of future and past. Life is completely overwhelming and they can’t do it any more.

“Sometimes we refer to suicide as a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and in that moment they have nothing but pain. They see themselves living like this for the rest of their lives, every minute.”

His research shows that a shocking number of kids think about suicide. In a sample of 10,000 young Ontarians aged 12 to 20, 31 per cent of young women and 18 per cent of young men said they had suicidal thoughts.

She was a sensitive child, she recalls, and when she was just eight the idea of suicide first crept into her mind. Small things disturbed her: losing a library book.

Though there was no reason to be frightened, these tiny fears exploded into unmanageable obstacles. Her parents — her dad is a guitar builder, her mom a teacher — were caring and supportive. She tried to keep on a “happy face” for them.

By 16 she was on antidepressants. She couldn’t rouse herself from bed. She began to think she was lazy. Wren made the first attempt on her life at 16 by taking an overdose.

The next day, she felt relieved. She didn’t have to hide her state any more. But there was shame, too. “Fear about how people would react. Would they be angry?”

By 28, she had made dozens more attempts.

“When you get to the point of wanting to end your life, you often lose sight of the fact that your suicide would in any way affect others, she says. “At times I even thought that I would be doing my family a favour by committing suicide because I knew that I was not easy to live with when I was consumed by my depression.”

She found little empathy in hospital emergency rooms. “There are really sick people who need the space here,” one nurse chastised her.

She cut and burned herself— a way, she says, of numbing her suffering. “For some it’s a relief, for some it’s release, for some it’s taking the pain that’s inside and putting it outside, for some it’s a form of control,” says Yvonne Bergmans, a St. Michael’s Hospital social worker who works with people who have repeated suicide attempts.

As Wren thinks back on those years, a shadow passes over her face. “It was almost addictive once I started, and it was hard to stop. I didn’t have other strategies to deal with emotional pain.

“Physically I felt as if my body was already dead. Emotionally, I’d go from extreme numbness to feeling so much, the feelings were going to kill me.”

In her early 20s, while studying social work at Ryerson University, she received electroconvulsive therapy. A psychiatrist told her she was setting herself up for failure if she returned to school, and that she’d never be well enough to have a full-time job.

But then she met Bergmans, who helped her manage her depression. She came to understand those dangerously intense emotions couldn’t last; they pass. She was encouraged to remember what it felt like to be well.

Now 32, she has learned how to practise the art of being well. When she comes home at night, she sits for an hour and reads. She makes jewellery — creating pendants with words such as hope, courage and resilience — plays beach volleyball, rides horses. She loves that physical connection to another living being. She lives with her partner, a college professor.

It was important to learn the habit of doing things that are good for her.

“It takes a lot of planning to handle the really dark times. When you’re in the midst of a crisis, that’s not the best time to plan.”

She has a shoe box, she calls her wellness box. It has knitting needles and red wool, hand cream, CDs with music that calms her. She’s learned the early warning signs that cause depression to flare: feeling overwhelmed, having deadlines she can’t meet, being criticized.

She may still have bouts of depression, but she has hope: “I’ve had years of difficult emotions without going to the spot of harming myself. It feels amazing.”

Antidepressants help keep her from feeling paralyzed by depression. And she sees a therapist she trusts who does “dialectical behavioural therapy,” which helps her find an emotional middle ground. “I can ride out really big feelings and not live in black and white. I can see there is a grey zone. To stop the thinking that something has to change or I’m going to kill myself.

“I used to think, ‘When are they going to fix me and give me a magic pill?’ I realized I was the only person who can prevent myself from killing myself.”

Contrary to predictions and her own fears that she would not work full-time, she has a job she finds meaningful as a case worker for the Canadian Mental Health Association.

She likes her role as an advocate for her clients. In her volunteer work in peer support groups, she tells young people that if they are not comfortable with their doctor, they should shop around. If they are not satisfied with their medication, they should educate themselves and ask a pharmacist about side effects, interaction with other medication, what kind of withdrawal they can expect.

She also reminds them that life really is worth living.

“Suicide not only ends your pain, but also a life’s worth of yet-to-be-discovered joy.”

She’d often been told she had nice eyes. The 22-year-old does: grey green and clear.

It helped. She looked in the mirror and liked what she saw. “When I was younger I’d wear a hoodie and I’d stare at the ground. I was very closed off. Then I took the hoodie off. I sat up. I smiled. I could look people in the eye. It showed confidence.”

It was as if she was seeing herself for the first time. She was not the 12-year-old who’d written in her diary she wanted to kill herself, nor the 13-year-old who got into the habit of cutting her body, carving demeaning words on her stomach and arms, nor the 16-year old who overdosed on prescription drugs.

She’d been diagnosed with depression. Her social group at school may not have been that different from others, but it caused her pain. Boys ranking girls, making lists of girls they liked to date.

She started drinking and smoking pot. Cutting, she says, is not a suicide attempt — it calmed her. She likens it to the way a smoker might need a cigarette.

She recalls the single attempt to end her life at 16. She’d been on MSN with her then boyfriend. “He was telling me I’d wrecked his life. I thought, ‘All right, forget this. I’m done.’ ” She took pills and fell asleep.

The next morning she roused herself. Her father heard her thud to the bathroom floor. He couldn’t wake her up and took her to the hospital.

Afterwards, “It was almost like there was no feeling. It wasn’t fear or desperation; it was very ‘whatever.’ At that point everything about my life was ‘whatever.’ ”

She was seeing a social worker — she’d had five of them plus two psychiatrists in her adolescence. She took herself off medication in Grade 12, which seemed to help.

“Suddenly I could think. If I felt something, I could try and think about why I felt that way. My brain just slowed down.”

She could consider solutions other than cutting or trying to kill herself. She made lists of the pros and cons when she had to make a decision. “And I stopped partying like my life depended on it.”

She couldn’t go back to who’d she’d been before the attempt. “I had to create a whole new person . . . develop a new Kristen who could be confident because that Kristen had never existed.”

She went to Ryerson University to study social work. In her application, she wrote that she dreamed of being able to say to a troubled young person, “I understand.”

Each year at university got better, she says. In her last year she had As and one B.

She graduated last spring, is working at a kids’ recreation program and lives with her boyfriend, who works in television.

“It still feels really weird, mainly because I didn’t expect to be here. I thought something horrible would happen before I was 18 and I wouldn’t have to think about a long-term relationship and working. It’s exciting to start planning my life.”

Her boyfriend told her: “Being happy isn’t automatic. You have to work to be happy and do things that make you happy.”

She’s belongs to several mental health organizations, including one called YO, Young Ones, Breaking Barriers. Its slogan is, “We care because we’ve been there.”

She wants young people to look in the mirror as she did and see a person who has value. “Tell yourself that every single day.”

“Everything about my mental state consumed me,” he says. “I couldn’t focus on anything but my own sense of self.”

By then he was then 19 and a Sheridan College student. He had a loving family and by all accounts, a good life. Shouldn’t he have outgrown teenage growing pains?

He saw his family doctor. “He asked, ‘How are you?’ It sounded like he really meant it. I cracked. I started crying. I’m a guy. You don’t cry.”

A year passed. He didn’t like the side effects of the antidepressant he’d been prescribed. He was eventually referred to a crisis centre. And he made a plan to end his life.

He came close. He was at home, feeling angry, kicked over some boxes and found a rope. He pulled on it and suddenly stopped. “What am I doing? Why am I so angry? I never assumed anyone would kill himself in a rage. I thought they’d be sad and by themselves.”

That was the summer of 2010. Over the days that followed he thought about his parents, who immigrated from Ireland in the late ’80s, looking to improve their lives in a new country. How would it have been for them to find him like that? It was a turning point.

“I suppose I scared myself that I had gotten that far. A couple of months later, I was thankful. I’d gone from that low to sort of being content and glad I’m alive.”

Savage is now 23 and a student at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He studies English and has an interest in transgressive fiction, the literature of taboo subjects.

He feels something of a mission to communicate. “The most confusing times are temporary. When you’re immersed in it, it feels like it’s gone on forever and is not going to stop. I suppose everyone has his own shake up . . . for me it was in my basement.

“I would feel guilty not expressing this and not letting people know those feelings are temporary, it is not the end of everything. You do have a bright future. It’s up to you.”

He is still on antidepressants, which mute the lows, he says. When he starts feeling stress as school work builds up, “I can push it away; I know I’ve written good essays before.”

He loves the readings he does for his classes. His can talk easily to his parents. His girlfriend has been rock-solid. “You feel your self-worth with someone like that.”

He has a spiral binder, a kind of journal that reminds him of how far he’s grown. He looks at an entry for Dec. 26, 2008, Boxing Day, a comfortable day when his family watches old movies and everyone stays in their pajamas. He’s surprised at what he’d written, about drifting away “forever.”

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